A NATION CHALLENGED: AN APPRAISAL; With Viewing Platforms, a Dignified Approach to Ground Zero

Transparency -- unobstructed vision -- is the solid virtue that will hold aloft a set of public viewing platforms on the perimeter of ground zero. Construction has begun on the first of four nearly identical platforms now proposed. The temporary structure is on Fulton Street, between Church Street and Broadway, just south of St. Paul Chapel, and it is to be completed by Friday.

Designed by an independent group of architects with support from a diverse group of city officials, union leaders and private donors, the viewing platforms are also notable for the disarming ease with which they have glided through unusually dense thickets of red tape. A city still in shock from September's terrorist attack has managed to create a quiet, dignified approach to what is now historic ground.

The platforms, a grass roots initiative, were designed by four of the city's most highly respected architects: David Rockwell (Rockwell Group), Kevin Kennon, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio (Diller & Scofidio). Major support for the project was extended by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and the heads of two city agencies, Christyne Lategano-Nicholas, of NYC & Company, the tourist and convention bureau; and Richard Sheirer of the Office of Emergency Management.

Built of exposed metal scaffolding and plywood planks, the platforms are visually neutral. They are not intended to be a memorial. Nonetheless, the design recalls an inverted version of Maya Lin's understated Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. U-shaped in plan, the platforms will be inserted like plugs into streets running perpendicular to the 16-acre site.

Two long, shallow plywood ramps, one for entering, the other for leaving, are attached to the platforms, which are 13 feet above ground. The ramps are 15 feet wide and 300 feet long, and visitors climbing them will gain a heightened awareness of their body weight, a physical metaphor for the gravity of the occasion. The narrow incline should also evoke a ceremonial procession. A plain birchwood wall, set between the ramps, is for posting photographs, writings and other expressions of memory, tribute and grief from visitors.

The station under construction will be entered from the Broadway end of the ramp on Fulton Street. The platform is to be 30 by 50 feet. An estimated 300 to 400 people can gather on the platform at a time. The entire structure will support more than 1,000 visitors at a time.

This project is unaffiliated with the professional groups already organized to prepare a coordinated response by New York architects to the terrorist attack. Materials, labor, design and engineering services were donated. Focus Lighting and the Atlantic-Heydt Corporation, a Queens hoisting and scaffolding concern, led the project's realization, which also relied on assistance from the many city departments overseeing the site.

The Alliance for Downtown New York, a business improvement district, will maintain the structures. Larry A. Silverstein, who acquired the lease on the World Trade Center last summer, has donated $100,000 to defray additional expenses for building the first platform. The architects have established a nonprofit organization, the WTC Platform Foundation, to raise the money to complete all four.

If feelings could be weighed, even rows of solid steel columns would not suffice to hold them up. The project is as emotionally charged as its design is simple. Though television has familiarized the world with ground zero, an unmediated encounter with the site is still overwhelming. The experience includes more than the sight of wreckage. No less moving are the placards, signatures, snapshots, writings, flags and other signs of personal loss.

For three months no property in the world has been subject to greater pressure from public attention. It has even become a contested site. Surviving spouses, children, other family members, friends, uniformed officers, co-workers, public officials, downtown neighbors, ordinary citizens, journalists, real estate developers, architects: all have a right to be here, though their motives sometimes conflict.

Since Sept. 11, many architects and artists have put forth unsolicited proposals for ground zero. Some of them have organized to develop coherent plans for the future of the financial district. With a new mayor about to take office and a redevelopment agency now in place, the city has moved closer to that future. There is now a clearer sense that decisions will be made.

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New buildings will or won't rise at ground zero. The financial center will or will not be induced to hold. Architecture and public spaces will be modeled after Battery Park City or after a more progressive vision of the contemporary city. Suspense will dissipate.

Given all these pressures, the appearance of the platforms could stir controversy. A decision has been made: one project is proceeding, others will not. The matter was not put to a referendum. No design competition was held. Issues of process and accountability were suspended. But this project emerged from a process of its own. Initiative, thoughtfulness, pragmatism and stealth were among its key components.

Most of the visions proposed by architects fell into one of two extremes. The bulk of them were personal fantasies projected onto the site with scant thought of realization. At the other extreme were ideas developed by the professional groups, like the American Institute of Architects, the Real Estate Board of New York, and the New York City Partnership. At one extreme, designers transmitted into a void. The other extreme is the void.

The professional groups were unable to grasp the basic priorities. The most prominent of these groups, the N.Y.C. Rebuild Infrastructure Task Force, had its eyes set on the hyperinflated agenda suggested by its title. The terrorist attack, while earth-shattering, produced no need to rebuild New York or its infrastructure.

Within weeks of the attack this group had created a privatized bureaucracy of its own. Its agenda was often mystifying, contradictory and self-serving. Immediate needs for public access and transportation became linked to sugar plum visions of new office towers and rail lines. Too much effort went into supporting the idea that a memorial and an office park could be agreeably accommodated on one site. Not enough effort was directed at examining that premise and others.

The viewing platform project emerged from dissatisfaction with this professionalized status quo. Weekend crowds had established the need to provide public access to the site. A design was needed to serve the need. It had to be easy and cheap, sturdy, and flexible. It had to come in without arousing opposition and with the mayor's blessing. It didn't have to deal with complexities of meaning.

But the design does hold meaning. It embodies stoic principles. It treats the need for design as a reduction to essentials. The result has substance. Stop the mystification, the grandiosity, the use of architecture to disconnect our history from ourselves. Give the city back. These ideas deserve to outlive the limited duration of the platforms themselves.

In fact, a potential parallel exists between this design and the so-called interim plan that was adopted for 42nd Street in 1992 after the collapse of a plan to build four nearly identical office towers on Times Square. Emphasizing diversity, communications and media spectacle instead of uniform corporate gigantism, the interim plan guided Times Square toward its current identity as a meeting ground for the producers and consumers of popular culture.

The temporary viewing platforms could perform a similarly pivotal role in reconceptualizing the identity of lower Manhattan. Other choices will eventually be made, decisions that will affect the cityscape for generations. Our builders could choose the no-risk option represented by Battery Park City: Ye Olde New York retrofitted with pseudo-progressive public art. Or just when the value of risk-taking itself is in jeopardy, they could look for new ways to interpret the city to itself.

There is no need to rush. What we're looking at is a process of taking stock that has barely commenced. Renzo Piano, architect of the future headquarters of The New York Times, told a reporter recently that the architects who could design well for ground zero are now only 4 or 5 years old. It takes time to achieve transparency where meaning is concerned.